I wonder if - in your experience - there is any problem that the average Windows-Office user faces every day and gets tired of that can be easily solved by a beginner in Perl...

The last person I `converted' I found pasting entries from a huge MS Word document into a form that populated a database. I demonstrated that it was possible to knock up a two-minute script that split the lines into records and executed a corresponding INSERT statement. ``Okay, maybe it is time I learned some of this'', was the reply.

The first thirty pages of the Camel deal exclusively with basic theory - that's more like what you read after you've been inspired than your inspiration. Show your friends how Perl can let them sit around drinking coffee when they would otherwise be performing some mundane administrative task and they'll be sold.